


In Fallow Fields

by just_a_dram



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Budding Love, F/M, Feelings Realization, Homecoming, Hope, Love Confessions, Post-Canon, Spring, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:01:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26759875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_a_dram/pseuds/just_a_dram
Summary: They’re drawn to it. This shell of a castle calls across leagues to them like the howl of a pack member lost in the night.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 20
Kudos: 186





	1. Chapter 1

They’re drawn to it. This shell of a castle calls across leagues to them like the howl of a pack member lost in the night.

Sansa comes back first. Her broken brother, who sees time out of order and doesn’t hardly remind her of the little boy that once was her favorite sibling, beside her, carried over still frozen tundra by the strongest man Sansa could muster for the job. No coin left and loyalties scattered by the collapse of their system of law and fealty, all she can promise him in payment is a place in her household, whatever shape that might take.

Jon trusted him. That was assurance enough for the once Lady of Winterfell.

She asked her scarred, battle worn, and deeply mourning brother to join them. “Whoever your father, it’s as much yours as it is ours. Come home with us.”

He didn’t lift his gaze to answer. “Tormund will keep you safe.”

When he bid them goodbye, it felt like for forever.

…

Perhaps it is Arya that brings him back, overcoming his reluctance through her sheer force of will. It is equally possible that he can’t help himself any more than Sansa could. But when they pass through the broken gate, Arya dragging a sack of turnips behind her over the snow and the two of them with swords strapped to their backs, Sansa’s heart climbs in her throat. It almost feels like hope.

He doesn’t talk much. Neither does her sister. They’re as much a pair of ghosts as the ones that stalk the crumbling halls of their ancestral home. But they’re here: with everyone else gone to the ground, these wolves have survived long enough for the coming of spring.

You wouldn’t know winter was fading, when he finds her alone, sitting atop a half wall, staring out over the empty vastness of the North. Jon and Arya say the South is thawing. Life coming back with a determined flush of melting water and softening ground that will eventually reach their doorstep.

It’s still cold enough here that she should be wearing her gloves along with her furs and heavy woolen gown. She disposed of them to feel the stones. They’re jagged in places, cracked by the explosive interaction of ice and fire. Just as she and her siblings were shattered by the ravages of war. She runs her hands over them, fingers questing. There is comfort in feeling as if the bones of this broken place are in concert with her soul. Both relics of another time.

What she was trained for is not worth anything in the new world that replaces the old. What Winterfell was built to be and do is just as useless. They deserve each other.

He pushes up on the wall beside her and sits, breath fogging the air. A subtle shift and his pale hand covers hers. His touch is surprisingly warm. Jon bothers less about the cold than any of them. A true Northerner. She always maintained that, she hopes he remembers.

She can hear his swallow in the silence that blankets them. “I missed this.”

The North. Their home. Her company.

Sansa is sure he means all of that. It’s strange this companionship they share–that they’ve shared since their reunion at the Wall but not before. She is as grateful for it now as she was then, met with familial affection after so much horror. Maybe more so now with no wars to fight, nothing to reclaim, no one to save. This thing, these connections are all she has left.

If she provides him some comfort, then perchance she is not so useless after all.

She turns her palm up, threading their fingers together, an answer to his confession.

…

Words spoken are the intimacy they share, made all the greater for Jon’s natural reticence and hers learned. Things she balks at saying to her sister and knows better than to divulge to Bran in all his cool detachment, she tells Jon. His is an ear without judgment. She aims to be the same for him.

And yet, there are things she hopes he will never speak of to her. No, not things: people.

Her coolness after his first attempt to share his personal burden must be lesson enough. For though she apologized on the morrow for refusing to listen, it was not her best show of regret, perfectly hollow in its falseness. That oily feeling in her belly would not let her spin a convincing picture of contriteness for Jon, for fear that he would open up again and pick at the scab over her heart she didn’t realize was there. Until he spoke that name before the hearth with his head canted down.

 _Daenerys_.

Sansa keeps Jon’s confidences locked in her chest, a safe repository for whatever he chooses to share with her. But she pours this particular poison into her sister’s breast, so that in not feeling it alone, she need not plumb the depth or cause of her discomfort upon his profession of love and loss.

Arya thinks of Jon as hers. Sansa reveals to her Jon’s thick-voiced sorrow at the loss of the Dragon Queen, hardly lessened by the passage of time, knowing her clannish little sister will scoff, knowing there will be an ample show of the jealousy Sansa hides behind tight smiles and folded hands.

What Arya wants is for them to be together forever. For things to be as they were when they were children as much as is possible in their altered world.

What Sansa wants is unspeakable.

…

Until he ventures to speak.

“You ought to marry.”

Her step stutters over a frozen row in a field Jon swears they’ll be able to plant in a few moon’s turn. This was to be an inexpert inspection of the land’s potential, not hers.

With a jerk, he grabs her arm to steady her. Thumb pressing into the soft give of her upper arm, it’s the sort of purposeful grip that would turn her blood to ice with any other man. There is no fear with Jon, however; not of that sort.

Nostrils flared at his unexpected assertion, she says nothing, save for nodding to indicate she’s found her footing again. He turns her loose and they continue at a slower pace with her heart skipping against her ribs.

“Have you not considered it?”

“Marriage?” she is forced to respond, her voice sounding thin and high.

“For the hope of an heir.”

“An heir to what?” she asks, and the validity of her question given their altered circumstances leaves him silenced for a space.

“For the pleasure of children then. You’d be a fine mother.”

Her lips part as she dares to turn her gaze on him. He wears that awkward, flat smile of his, when he meets her eye. “I had thought perhaps to find you wed to Tormund.”

Her brows lift. “Do you jest?”

“He would be a good husband.”

“He speaks of fucking bears.”

Jon’s laugh is real. It’s loud in the quiet of the fallow, long abandoned field, and it brings a soft smile to her face, as her chest swells with the joy of that sound. There is some mirth left, some joy to be found even in the absurd.

He looks at her and then away, eyes wrinkling at the corners before staring into the middle distance.

“Have you ever wondered if he means Maege Mormont with that bear business?” Sansa asks.

“The thought has crossed my mind.”

“The Mormont women were never fools.”

“No, aye, they weren’t.”

“He’s not a man I would care to wed, but I am as fond of him as you are. With good reason.”

Jon sniffs and pauses, boots crunching the hoarfrost as he stops. Sansa hesitates, waiting for some uninformed assessment of the ground beneath their feet, which he stares at with increasing intensity evinced by his gritted jawline.

He stamps his boot once and tilts his head to the left. “I was relieved though. That you weren’t married to Tormund. Not him specifically. Any man.”

She crosses her hands together over her middle and breathes the chill in through her nose. If she wasn’t already very awake, this would do the trick quite neatly. It does help sharpen her thoughts, which are otherwise scattered with panic.

“Why is that?”

“I thought you and I might try–”

“Yes?”

“I think we’d have a chance at happiness.”

“Do you?” She presses her lips together, wishing he would look up, so she could read something in his eyes, something more than what he gives voice to. But he doesn’t, so, she tests him with one of her private thoughts of self-accusation, prodding him. “Would that not make us Lannisters?”

If she wanted to be cruel, she would name his paternal family’s house with its tradition of marrying brother to sister. But she has no desire to cause him further pain.

“It’s awkward. I am… forever finding myself in awkward situations.”

Sansa’s mouth twitches. Daenerys was his aunt–awkward, but perhaps not as awkward as their match would be with the ties of kinship in childhood already in place.

“You hate the idea then?” he asks, and Sansa reaches out to draw her hand down the length of his arm, stopping just short of taking his hand in hers.

The knuckle of her curved finger grazes the tendons in his hand before she draws it back against the waist of her gown. “I don’t discount that we might be content, but Arya wouldn’t like it.”

“No,” he agrees with scuff of his boot over the ground and another stomp. “And Bran?”

Sansa shrugs. There’s never any telling how Bran will react. He’s as like to say nothing as he is something dreadful.

Their siblings aren’t the insurmountable problem, however. “And you haven’t really moved on.”

He would look up at her if he had. He would look her boldly in the face with that softness she knows he still has in him, but there is someone between them–a dead woman.

He gives the smallest shake of his head.

“Then we’ll speak on it again, when you have, Jon.”


	2. Chapter 2

The slow melting of the ice that drapes everything after the long winter is a menace as much as a promise. Under the influence of the thaw, giant icicles threaten to crash from the ledges of Winterfell’s partially toppled towers and low ledges. The larger ones–big as Southron sept columns–Jon topples with Tormund to save anyone from becoming a victim of a collapse.

Smaller, more innocuous crystals remain, creaking and dripping night and day, making the old castle sound as if it is coming back to life. Sansa hears it bleeding through her sleep, tapping in rhythm with the beat of her heart. It brings strange dreams. Dreams of bare flesh–not white from the cold but pink with exertion. Of warm waters, lapping about her legs and salty on the back of her tongue. Of pleasure so sharp, she wakes shaking from it.

Some mornings, she can hardly manage the mending, for weariness from her disturbed sleep. Plying her needle becomes a minor hazard. Even in the brightest morning light, she pricks herself like a novice. Jon’s heavy stare at the quick suck she gives her finger’s tiny bloom of blood is laden with scrutiny, and she casts her gaze to the window to escape the feel of it upon her cheeks.

The sky outside is blue, not the quartz grey of short winter days. It’s bluer with each passing day.

Spring is upon them.

…

It’s a source of discord between her and Jon, timing when to plant their crop of turnips and potatoes. This will be their first crop, quicker to reach harvest than cereals and more tolerant of cool nights, but still a challenge for people with no practical knowledge of agriculture. Without the maester’s records–all burned or lost–and with very little practice assessing a winter’s true end, they bicker over whether the time has come or if they still stand to risk their seed stock.

Sometimes Sansa urges caution. Sometimes Jon is the one to preach continued patience. They are never of an accord.

Tormund settles the question with a crudely worded declaration of ample sowing experience. He even vows to ferment a drink from the harvest to come that will put hair on all their chests. She has no taste for strong drink and no desire to sprout her own pelt, but she’ll happily settle for bushels of dirty potatoes cooked ten ways. Intemperance, no matter how much men enjoy it, must wait. Being free from the stalking threat of starvation will bring its own satisfaction.

…

Lord and ladies turned farmers plant. For days. Until the soil is prepared and seeds sown and she aches all over.

After a simple supper, she means to slip away to seek the comfort of her straw mattress and heaped furs, when Jon stops her behind the kitchens and takes her hand. There’s dirt under her nails from working the soil like a proper crofter’s wife and her skin is red from the burn of a cold wind. They’re not the hands of a lady. She can’t regret it though, as his thumb traces the rise and fall of her knuckles.

“I’ve been wanting to speak with you. On something other than our planting schedule.”

They’re only a few yards from the rest of the household. The deep rumble of Tormund jesting with her sister reaches them with perfect clarity. Bran is bundled in his chair, carving at a piece of wood with a short knife, but always listening. It is hardly a private space to renew talks of their future.

And yet, this is what she has waited for, as surely as she’s waited for the ground to willingly give to the piercing of iron.

“Sansa–” Her attention is drawn back to his bearded face, cast in shadow, eyes dark, as he repeats the movement of his thumb and she feels an answering prickle of flesh along her neck and arms. “Arya knows. I told her. She called me a swine in three languages, but she didn’t gut me.”

She inhales, adjusting to this sudden realignment of her small world. Their sister is a champion of expediency: perhaps she is drawn to the convenience of such an arrangement that will forge them more assuredly into an unbreakable unit.

“It went better than expected then.”

“Better than expected,” he echoes back, pulling her hand into the center of his chest.

“You must have been quite certain of my answer to speak to Arya first.”

“As certain as I am of mine.”

He shifts on his feet, unmanned by his confession. He wears it–the softness that crinkles his eyes and pulls at his full mouth, cracking her open, exposing the parts of herself she wanted to keep safe from abuse. Parts she can give to him.

His eyes lower, as if he might kiss her, when he asks, “Was I wrong?”

His chest rises and falls beneath their entwined hands. Boiled leather, a woolen tunic, and rough linen she’s mended more than once with neat stitches conceal the warmth she knows lies underneath. But layers can’t obscure the steady heave of his lean chest or the sound of his breathing, as he steps in close. Tipping her face up, she unfurls her fingers against him, not because the closeness is unwelcome, but to better indulge in the sensation of life under her touch.

There are no windows in the stony corridor. Still she hears it: the drip and creak of ice giving way.

They aren’t relics. Not yet.


	3. Chapter 3

A warm morning following on the heels of a cool night coats the blades of thin, bright grass with glittering dew. It darkens the hem of her wedding gown, creeping up the hem with every steady step she takes. Until it soaks through the layers beneath, penetrating to the flesh. Standing beneath the spreading limbs that make up what’s left of the godswood, Sansa feels the dampness in the cling of the embroidered stockings she rolled up her calves, when she woke and dressed without aid of a serving girl on her wedding day.

A moon or two ago, wet stockings and dew laden skirts in the chill of the morning air would have raised the delicate hairs on her arms and up the back of her neck. But it is warm. Blissfully so. Blue skies herald the day and the spring sunshine is a bright white that pierces the soil as certainly as it does the eyes, forcing her to blink against each chink of light that breaks the canopy as she approaches. The season has shifted.

With the sun shining in through the trees, the only thing that sends a thrill up her spine is Jon’s hand taking hers and pulling her in close with his eyes fixed upon her lips.

...

Sansa dislikes the taste of sour wine and ale, but Tormund’s fermented potatoes yield a practically flavorless drink. The warm burn it sets up in her belly is the same as if it was a chore to force down, but she manages to sip it without a grimace.

There are no frowns today, not even from her stony faced little brother or Arya, who has made it plain she wants none of the details of their arrangement, save that she might teach any forthcoming children to wield a sword, believing her technique superior to Jon’s. However skilled her sister is--and her skill is considerable--Sansa can’t bring herself to agree with the assessment entirely. Arya might be the only one alive to have watched Jon fight the undead on behalf of Westeros and scoff at his form. Even Tormund, for all his teasing, does not fault Jon on that point.

Tormund is plenty fond of teasing though, and today’s proceedings have unleashed a torrent of jests. She smiles over her cup at Jon--her lord husband--as Tormund claps him on the back hard enough to slosh some of the clear liquid over the rim of Jon’s cup onto his black jerkin. The broad-chested wildling urges Jon to drink. Filling his cup back up even as Jon protests. Again. For a second time and a third. It’s as merry as any of them have been, since they returned to Winterfell. It is their wedding that has made it so, even more so than the drink.

_For a wedding toast_ \--that’s how Tormund convinced Jon to grant him some of the harvest. It was not a bad crop, despite their collective lack of skill, and with the threat of starvation put aside, Jon allowed his friend the indulgence. Just so long as it was done in the name of pleasing Sansa.

She could have done without. Though weddings before were celebrated with feasting and drinking and song, Sansa doesn’t think anything missing from their day. Although, she wouldn’t have turned her nose up at a hind of venison in lemon gravy or a towering fruit cake iced in marzipan with candied lemons--anything with lemons, which she sometimes thinks she’ll never taste again, isolated in a North cut off from what feels like the rest of the world. A dress that she didn’t have to mend by the light of the fire might have been welcome too. But the strong burn of this drink will probably serve the bride and bridegroom better.

There were times past, when she drank to drown her sorrows on a wedding night. This isn’t like that. There are nerves, but she doesn’t dread the moment they will be alone. She doesn’t fear Jon’s lips on hers or his hands at her waist.

She has awakened from dreams of a full stream and arching backs on the banks with hair twined around fingers that pull. In that place between sleep and waking, she remembered it, no shadowed figures but clear enough to be a memory, not a figment. Jon’s dark hair, his beard rough on her skin, and his hands sure and eager. It felt familiar and welcome, as if it had always been him.

But there are ghosts. Hers and his. And though not all are malicious--her lord father and lady mother, for one--they haunt them all the same. And so she sips, welcoming the burn, and watches him with cheeks that hurt from smiling, as Tormund claps him one more time.

...

“I’ve had too much,” Jon says, sinking his head into his hands, as she lowers herself beside him on the bed.

Pulling his hands through his hair brings it back. It’s like lightning briefly illuminating a distant corner of her mind--hands in her hair, hot mouth on her neck, and twitching muscles under her questing touch. A moment from a dream as real as if it were out of time, akin to Bran's own warped vision of the world. He’s left her panting in an empty passageway, from his kisses, but they’ve never touched like that.

She swallows thickly and moves to touch his leg, grounding herself in what’s real. Looking down at her pale fingers against the dark of his breeches, as his comforting warmth seeps through the coarse fabric.

The icicles are gone. Melted by the sun and sent crashing down to the ground, where the mud became so thick, it could suck you in with its viscous pull as much as from its earthy fecund smell.

But she still hears it, in the silence of the room, the awakening water, tip-tapping to the beat of her heart.

“You needn’t keep your wits about you. It’s only me.”

It’s a trick, getting the words out, as an unfamiliar desire urges her to test the firmness of his thigh higher, following the rise of muscle.

“Only you?” he says with an awkward smile, the one she’s loved too much for too long.

Over tables shared, whether talking of the past, worrying about the future, or dining on meager fare, she’s looked on it and felt an answering flutter. Sometimes a pleasant sensation and other times a shock of terror, since everything she has ever loved has been ripped from her grasping hands.

Surely he wore it when they were children, though she struggles to summon images of them as children, running through the halls of this shell of a great castle. But she knows she felt no great fondness for it. Not then. Not like Bran’s smile delighted her, the one he no longer can summon.

“You are my weakness.”

The low gravel of the confession and his gaze raking over her, swells her chest in anticipation of something so close. Her cheeks, growing warm, betray the pleasure his words awaken in her. She ought not to want it, but she longs to be more than a convenient match, something that might bring them both a small measure of happiness.

He reaches up and tucks her hair behind her ear, his rough fingers following the curve of her ear with impossible care. “Weakness or strength. I’m not certain which.”

“Either way,” she says, fingernail toying with the weave of his breechcloth, “you overstate my importance.”

A wedding night pronouncement perhaps. Made to assuage whatever jealousies she might wickedly harbor. It isn’t necessary. He is more than enough, his being hers is plenty. She will never cease being grateful for what remains.

His dark brows climb high, as his fingertips tease at her hairline. “I couldn’t even put up a good show of refusing, when Arya came for me.”

Her head tilts, as she takes in the long slope of his nose, the rise of his cheeks, his dark eyes. No one is as formed for this place than Jon--the spitting image of their father, of a long line of Starks.

“These walls call us home.”

“No, it’s the people in them,” he says, the curve of his finger lazily tracing her flesh, up and down. “I turned down Winterfell before, when it was offered. You I could not refuse. I’d tried. I left, I went south because of you.”

Sansa would have never sent him South. She begged him not to go to an early grave like their father, uncle, and grandfather before him. “Not for me.”

She can’t make herself say Daenerys’ name aloud but Jon’s eyes cut sharply to hers all the same, the unsaid plain.

He might have mourned her and loved her once and her dragons may have played a role in the fight for the dawn, but Daenerys was a threat to everything Sansa wanted from the moment the Dragon Queen stepped foot on Westeros’ soil. She is an apparition better unnamed.

“When I left for Dragonstone...” With his fingers lingering at the bend of her neck where her gown ends, his throat rolls above his collar. She wishes they’d go farther, sink into the thick of her scalp. She’s ready to lean into his touch, rub against him like a mewling kitten. “You are not a Lannister, but I may be.”

She blinks, as the words sink into her, clearing her fogged mind. It rearranges conversations and looks that passed between them into a slightly shifted reality, and she sits there, letting all the pieces settle.

Would the acknowledgement have unnerved her then? As he was taking his leave? She felt so desperate to keep him close, so fearful of losing a piece of her family that felt as vital as a piece of herself, she can’t be sure.

However she might have felt, it doesn’t matter now. The past is just that and they have survived until now to face a future together.

She bumps his shoulder with hers, hoping to draw another hint of a smile from him. “Of the two of us, I am the only one who was--for a time--a Lannister. You are a Stark.”

“Targaryen then.”

“Yes, and in another world,” she says, letting her hand slide up as she imagined doing, the heavy fabric rasping under the brush of her hand, “where Father did not have to pretend you were something you were not, I might have always been yours. He might have wanted us to wed, and saved us both some trouble.”

“ _Trouble,_ ” he repeats at the minimizing of their miseries. At that he finally does smile, something broader than his upside down twitch of a smile. “We still would have argued.”

“Oh, worse,” she agrees. “In the end, though, it’s all the same. I am yours.”


End file.
